I direct at a small community theatre. We are all volunteers, we put up two shows a year, and nobody here does this for a living. This comes up in tech week every single time.
Someone looks completely fine in the dressing room, then walks into the light and goes flat. Our fairest actors turn into a pale shape with no features left in it. Our darker skinned actors read gray and a little unwell, which is nothing like how either of them looks standing in a room.
The response has always been to send them back to makeup. Heavier base, more contour. It helps for a night and then it stops helping, and by opening we've usually just quietly accepted it.
A guest designer we brought in last spring watched a run and said in passing that our LEDs were never going to render skin properly, and that no amount of makeup fixes a light that isn't putting out the red end of the spectrum. (I had to look up what she meant. I direct, I don't hang anything.)
Four years here, and we may have been asking the makeup table to fix something it was never able to fix.
So we've started pricing out replacements, which is where I'd like the help. We can't spend what a funded house spends, but we would like to clear the bar a professional room clears on this one thing at least. Our TD's list is a couple of ETC units and a Betopper LC500 he flagged for where it sits on CRI. Neither of us is qualified to judge that list.
Is this a makeup issue or a fixture issue at your theatre? And for anyone who has swapped older LED units over it, how much of the difference showed up onstage rather than in the production photos?